Asklemmy

I'm generally in favor of the fewest possible restrictions; I'd rather change the cultural attitude and situations that lead to violence in the first place than restrict the tools that people use. Cramming tons of poor people with no hope for a better future into a very small area, for instance; that's a pretty solid predictor of bad outcomes.

First, I think that any costs associated with laws on gun ownership should be covered by income and wealth taxes. (I also think that state and national parks should be funded the same way; I oppose fee-based gov't services. It's it's a public good that the gov't should be performing, then it should be fully funded.)

I would absolutely favor mandatory training for people that wanted to own firearms, but I'd also make sure that training was on-demand, easily accessed, and paid for by income taxes and not fees. (So, like, Cook County, IL couldn't have only one class every month that meets 30 miles east of O'Hare at 3:30am on Tuesday morning, with a maximum of five spots open, all to make sure that very, very few people can legally own firearms.) I do generally think that people should know under what circumstances they can legally use lethal force, and I'd support free--as above--classes for anyone that wanted a carry permit. Carry permits should be free to people that have attended the classes. I support free universal background checks on all firearm transfers. I'd have to consult with how to make background checks on private transfers work, because I wouldn't want Joe Schmoe holding onto a 4473 that I filled out--too much personal information--but I also don't want the gov't having a database of all private transfers that would become a de facto registry.

I'm generally in favor of removing the rights from someone once they have been convicted of a violent offense, but not usually otherwise. (I think that 'violent offense' would need to be carefully defined so that states couldn't e.g. redefine speeding as a violent offense.) I think red flag laws might be a good idea--people planning acts of mass murder usually 'leak' information in the days or weeks prior--but the way they're currently implemented is not good at all, and it can take months to get your rights back.

So in the US when we want to make something illegal, and that thing happens to be a constitutional right, we levy a tax against it. Then we only issue tax stamps to very select few people, or simply refuse to issue them at all. NFA 1934 is one of those weird tax scheme that makes you obtain a $200 tax stamp to have certain types of weapons. They are heavily controlled and non-transferable without going through a similar process.

Here's more info about it if you care to look into it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act

We also did this with Marijuana during that same time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marihuana_Tax_Act_of_1937

Honestly, all of politics is compromise. It's very unlikely that there's ever going to be anyone that perfectly aligns with my personal opinions. So I have to pick and choose, and decide which things are absolutely critical for me, and which ones I will bend on. For me, church/state separation, reproductive choice, and LGBTQ rights are my tops for individual rights; gun rights matter to me, personally, but I'd be willing to bend on that if it meant removing the evangelical stranglehold over state and local gov't.

I'd start by admitting that school shootings are, despite being extremely sensationalized, also extremely rare. Then I'd look at the risk factors that the FBI outlined after looking at "school shooters". (In scare quotes, because the people that commit random acts of violence in schools---versus targeted violence--are so uncommon that it's hard to draw definite conclusions about risk factors. School shootings are also used by certain organizations to include things like parents shooting each other in the parking lot at a football game.) There's a myth that school shooters are always the victim of bullies, but IIRC it's slightly more common that they'll be bullies. Almost all of them 'leak' information in the days or weeks prior to murders; I do think that there needs to be a way to seriously investigate things like that, but I don't know how you could do that in a way that doesn't infringe on other, equally fundamental rights.

When you get right down to it, a lot of it is an issue of culture, where people feel like violence is a reasonable way to express feelings. That culture needs to be changed, and I believe that it can be changed without removing the tools used in the violent acts.

Violence in general is a very complicated problem, and it's tempting to look at simple solutions and believe that there's this one simple trick that the NRA hates that will turn everything into a utopia. But that's just not so. (Case in point: the UK and Australia both have combined rates of violent crime--battery, forcible rape, robbery, murder--comparable to the US, and, in the case of rape in Australia, likely rather higher. The US does have a sharply higher murder rate though; our violence is more lethal.)

The unfortunate truth is that you can't have rights without someone misusing those rights to hurt other people. If people can drive, sooner or later someone is going to drive a rental van into a crowd, just because they want to kill people and that's the way they can do it. If you allow freedom of religion, eventually an L. Ron Hubbard, Jim Jones, or Joe Smith is going to turn up.